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THE WHITE HOUSE

Office of the Press Secretary
(New York, New York)

For Immediate Release February 15, 1996

REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
ON EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY INITIATIVE

St. Michael's School
Union City, New Jersey

11:30 A.M. EST

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much. Mr. Vice
President, thank you for that introduction and for your leadership to
advance the technological revolution in America and especially to bring
its benefits to all of our children. Thank you, Mr. Mayor;
Superintendent Highton; Senator Lautenberg; Congressman Menendez,
Secretary of Education Klagholz; Bob Fazio, the principal of this fine
high school -- (applause) -- I'm glad he's not running for President
this year. (Laughter and applause.)

Jim Cullen, the vice chairman of Bell Atlantic, thank
you so much for everything you have done to make this school district a
success, and the work you have done throughout this state and throughout
your area of service. To the folks at Bergen Academy, and Secretary
Riley and to others joining us on the Information Superhighway,
including students from 65 schools in three counties, and I believe
Congressman Torricelli is out there in cyberspace somewhere. It's nice
to have all of you with us. And let me say a special word of thanks to
the parents, the teachers and the students of this school and the Bergen
Academy who joined us today to talk about what all this means to our
children and our future. And let me ask us all to give a special word
of recognition to the two students who just spoke, who must have been
somewhat nervous, but did not betray it, Marlon Grenados and Tonya
Nagahwatte, they did a great job. (Applause.)

I've very glad to be back in New Jersey and in Union
City. All of you know that the Vice President and I came here today
because this school system is undergoing a remarkable transformation. I
want the rest of the country to know about it, and I want everybody in
the country to be able to emulate it. Let me begin by acknowledging the
contributions of Congressman Bob Menendez, who was formerly mayor here,
a true native son of Union City -- (applause) -- a sponsor of the New
Jersey Telecommunications Act in 1991 that set the stage for the
remarkable events we are celebrating today.

The rebirth of Union City and your schools reminds us
that we do live in an age of great possibility if people are willing to
work together to make the most of it. More Americans from all walks of
life will have more chances to live up to their dreams than at any time
in our nation's history. New technologies are opening prospects for
vast new areas of human activity that will bring prosperity. A growing
global marketplace is putting a premium on the kind of ingenuity and
skills Americans can contribute to the present and the future.

But, let's face it. We also know that this new era is a
time of great new challenges, putting new pressures on families that are
not particularly well equipped to deal with it. More and more of our
citizens are living better, but more and more of our families are
working harder and harder just to keep up. They justifiably wonder if
they and their children will be winners in this new age, or if they will
be left behind in some downsizing or in some job in which they never get
a raise.

After what I have seen today, I believe more strongly than
ever before the answer to the problems of those who are not yet
benefitting from the Information Age is not to try to put walls up or
turn around and go back, it is to keep going forward until every child
and every family in every home, in every workplace can see what we are
seeing here today. (Applause.)

You know, in the State of the Union address, I talked about
the importance of the budget discussions we have been having in
Washington for the last year, the need to finish the work of balancing
the budget but to do it in a way that recognizes our obligations to our
future through investments in education and environmental protection,
and that recognized our obligations to our families and to our larger
American family, including those who through no fault of their own need
help from all of us and that's why we ought to preserve the Medicare and
Medicaid programs. (Applause.)

But I also said there, and I would like to reiterate here,
I believe there is a broad bipartisan consensus in this country to
continue the work until we have eliminated this permanent deficit, until
we are living within our means, until we are committed, all of us, in
living on a balanced budget.

So what we have to do now is look to the future. In that
address, I outlined what I believe are the seven great challenges facing
America if we want all Americans to have a chance at the American Dream,
and if we want to grow together, not be driven apart. We must build
stronger families and better childhoods. We must have better education.
(Applause.)

We must make sure all of our children -- every single one
of them -- has access to the educational opportunities of the present
and the future. We must build economic security for every single
working family genuinely willing to work for it to hook into that future
so that they will not be left behind. We must continue the fight to make
our streets safer until crime in America is once again the exception,
not the rule. We must work to clean up our environment while we grow
our economy and forever dispose of the myth that you cannot have a
strong economy unless you are destroying your environment. We cannot
afford any more of the luxury of pretending that that is true.
(Applause.)

We must continue to work to lead the world toward a
direction that is more peaceful and free. And, finally, our government
must be one that serves and works and earns your trust, instead of your
distrust.

I think it is fair to say that none of those goals can be
achieved unless we are successful in improving the quality of education
for all Americans. We will do this through a partnership, not through
big government. The high-tech Information Age means that all large
bureaucracies will be restructured, that more decisions will be pushed
down to the grass roots, that people will be able to make more decisions
for themselves.

But we dare not go back to an era when all of our people
were left to fend for themselves. We have to go forward together, with
teamwork, just the way Union City has gone forward together, with
teamwork to have this remarkable educational achievement we celebrate
today. (Applause.)

I thank Congressman Menendez for what he said and echoing
the title of the First Lady's book, which I'm pretty proud of.
(Applause.) He is right, it does take a whole village to raise and
educate our children. And it takes all of us to meet all these common
challenges.

That's what Union City is an example of. That's why we
wanted to come here today. I loved looking into the eyes of young
people in the meeting which we just came from and hearing one of them
say, you know, the thing about this technology is we can all achieve.
It doesn't matter whether we're the richest family in the state or not.
It doesn't matter what our background is. It doesn't matter if our
parents came here just a few years ago. This is the great equalizer.
We can have high standards and high expectations and we can all make it
if we work together. That is the message America needs to heed today.
(Applause.)

For three years, working with our distinguished Education
Secretary, Dick Riley. who may not be a cheerleader in his next life --
(laughter) -- but has been a terrific cheerleader for America's children
for the last three years and, indeed, even before. We have worked on a
simple strategy for education. We believe in high standards. We
believe in high expectations. We believe in high levels of opportunity.
We believe in high technology. And we believe the doors of college
should be open to every single American citizen. (Applause.)

We have worked hard to expand Head Start, to implement the
Goals 2000 program, which gives to states and school districts the
ability to advance toward high national standards through grass roots
reform, like public school choice or even letting teachers start their
own public schools; or doing things like you have done here that can't
be done everywhere in the beginning. We have worked to create a network
of School-to-Work programs to help young people who don't go on to
college immediately to at least find good jobs and to continue their
education when they leave high school. We have set challenges to
schools to recognize that they must impart the basic values that keep
our society together, through character education and teaching good
values and good citizenship.

All these things we have done. We have expanded Pell
Grants and created a new direct lending program that makes it easier for
young people to borrow money for college and easier for them to repay
it. Our AmeriCorps program is now giving 25,000 young Americans a
chance to work in their communities to solve problems at the grass roots
and earn money for college.

But we have to do more. In the State of the Union I
proposed giving $1,000 merit scholarship to the top five percent of
every high school graduating class, to expand work study to include a
million students so more people can work their way through college.
(Applause.) And if we are going to cut taxes, what better way to do it
than to give a tax deduction of up to $10,000 to every American family
for the cost of college tuition. That would be a good way to cut taxes.
(Applause.)

But we know that none of these things will work until we
bring the information and technology revolution into every school; and
through the schools, into the homes of every school student in the
United States of America. You heard the Vice President say he was in
Philadelphia yesterday to celebrate the birthday of ENIAC, the first
computer. He was too delicate to say it's 50 years old this year, and
it was born in the same year I was. (Laughter.) The computer and I
this year will become eligible to join the American Association of
Retired Persons. (Laughter and applause.) I don't know about the
computer, but I hope I don't quite qualify this year. (Laughter.)

Let me just say, when I was the age of the students here --
let me just give you some examples of what has happened in this 50
years. When I was the age of the students that we met with today, the
big technological breakthroughs were technicolor movies and stereo
music. I can remember when 3-D movies came out and you got to wear
little glasses to look at the movies and we really thought that was hot
stuff, that we had to put glasses on to see movies that looked like real
people. I remember when color televisions and cellular telephones and
computers that could fit on somebody's desk were science fiction; nobody
could even imagine it.

For our young people today that all seems like ancient
history, not science fiction. They interact with computers at the
supermarket, at the check-out counter, in video arcades, in their homes.
You know, to them it's all second nature. I'd venture to say that at
least half the adults in this room have learned more about computers
from their kids than from any other source.

But it's a real misfortune that not every schoolroom in
America has the computers we celebrate today here and at the Bergen
Academy. That is wrong. And that's why I have issued this challenge to
our nation to form a national partnership to make sure every young
American has access to the future through the Information Superhighway.

When I was young, I thought the future was there for every
American who would work for it. It turned out to be true for my
generation. It will be true for this generation, too, and it will be a
bigger, brighter, broader future, but only if we bring the benefits of
the information revolution to every single one of them. (Applause.)

Bob Menendez talked about the achievements of this school
district. But think about it. Not so long ago the school system was on
the brink of a state takeover under New Jersey's law that, actually, has
a lot to recommend it, saying that if students aren't learning, the
state should have a right to move in. But you rescued it. And you did
it the way we have to meet our challenges -- everybody working together,
everyone doing their part, the Board of Education voting to modernize,
Bell Atlantic making all the contributions it made linking up the
schools, the state of New Jersey helping with its resources, teachers
and experts writing a new curriculum, parents actually coming here for
weekend training taught by a teacher and her students, parents who now
can work with their children at home on the computer. And the students
have taken this opportunity and this responsibility. They feel
empowered, and they know it makes learning more fun.

You know that with the computers in the classroom and at
home, linked together, homework is being done in a new way; classrooms,
lessons take on a new life; parents and teachers can keep in touch by
e-mail. Test scores have gone up and truancy and dropout rates have
gone down. In the words of the Vice President, that he coined four
years ago: everything that should be up is up and everything that
should be down is down, and that's the way it ought to be all over
America. (Applause.)

We're not just talking about an option that it would be
nice for schools to have. Over 130 recent academic studies have shown
clearly that the use of technology and support of instruction has led to
higher achievement and language and art and math and social studies and,
of course, in science. We have dramatic proof of the power of
technology to expand opportunity for our young people. We have to
harness that power and spread it throughout this country.

In the State of the Union, I called on Americans to join in
this national mission to make every child technologically literate, to
connect every classroom and library in our country by the dawn of the
21st century, which is just a few years away, to connect them with
quality computers, trained teachers, creative software. We must do
everywhere what you have done here.

We are making real progress. We are bringing companies and
volunteers together in California to wire 20 percent of those schools
this year alone. And the Vice President and I are going out there in a
few days to celebrate that. And in the telecommunications bill which I
signed last week, there is a requirement for companies to provide a
discount for connecting all of our classrooms and libraries to the
Information Superhighway. And I thank the people in Congress who
unanimously -- almost unanimously -- passed that bill, and the
industries that supported it. We must all continue to do our part.

But our national government must do its part, too.
Consistent with the recommendations of the National Information
Infrastructure Advisory Committee, which I appointed and which recently
issued its last reports full of communications executives and others
expert in communication around our country, I am today announcing a
major initiative to energize our people to work to fulfill that mission
even more quickly. I am proposing in my present budget, paid for in the
balanced budget, a $2 billion technology literacy challenge that will
put the future at the fingertips of every child in every classroom in
America. (Applause.)

The two members of Congress here present are in a unique
position to support this endeavor -- Senator Lautenberg, because before
he became a senator, he was in the information business, and he saw the
possibilities of computers, and he knows it should be used to do more
than make successful businesses, it should make successful students; and
Congressman Menendez because of what he has done with you here.

Together, working with like-minded Democrats and
Republicans, we can make this America's cause. We can do this. We can
have computers in every classroom. We can have all students eager to
learn. We can have the face of every, single child light up, and we can
know that down deep inside every child can believe again that he or she
-- no matter what their background, no matter what their economic
challenges -- can fulfill the mission that they have the capacity to
fulfill. We can do this. We can do it together and I believe we will.
(Applause.)